Thank you, Hooman. [BTW, some of you may want to note the spelling of
Hooman] Part 1 was great! I especially appreciated the Pre-history
section in Tabriz. As you know the Iranian Autobiography as a genre is
very rare so what you're giving us is a real treat. I know it's difficult
to expose yourself like this, but I can only encourage you to keep
providing the whole story and not hold back any details. In fact, I may
have to keep a copy for my virtual Persian Computing Museum. (I just
received my first printed Arabic Yeh exhibit this morning as a matter of
fact.) In a few years, kiddies will sit down to type Persian and not
realize how lucky they are. I've also all along been noting the painful
story of those who brought printing and the press to Iran in their day.
Please do continue the story as you have time and inclination. And thank
you for getting after the other old-timers as well. I've been trying to
tell them how important it is to document every detail for years! This is
truly one of THE MOST IMPORTANT threads on this list. Thank you again and
again for sharing your story!
-Connie
On Mon, 7 Jun 2004, Hooman Mehr wrote:
> Hi everybody, especially Connie,
>
> First of all, apologies for not being around for a while. I was kind of
> busy with miscellaneous obligations...
>
> I promised Connie to write something about the history of my
> involvement with Persian computing. This is the first part in a series
> of posts. It acts as an introduction to establish the context and
> background. As such, it is not fully about Persian computing per se.
>
> OK, here begins my story as a life in the history of Persian computing:
>
> 1. Pre-history
>
> In the early eighties, during my high school days in Tabriz, I was
> obsessed with thinking about the meaning of life and my mission in
> life, playing with cats, studying geometry and modern physics
> (Einstein, Heisenberg, etc.), shooting with my air rifle, throwing
> knives at any wooden target, touring the city on my bicycle, building
> shelves and cabinets for the family and friends, building and tweaking
> hand-made Hi-Fi for my sister, building small steam engines with my
> cousin, trying to build gunpowder-propelled model rockets with my best
> friend, and other weird stuff. Those days I was totally unaware of
> girls, my appearance and my (lack of) social behavior. Back then, I
> barely knew computers existed, they where completely absent from my
> world. This period of my life coincides with the period of war,
> full-scale embargo, terrorist attacks, and the government treating
> anybody who wasn't an insider like the enemy.
>
> I barely thought about what career I would like to pursue, but was
> inclined to become a mechanical engineer. Then I graduated high school
> in 1984 and immediately took the university entrance exam and landed in
> Sharif University of Technology as a student of civil engineering. It
> was quite a surprise and disappointment for me. I disliked civil
> engineering, but I did a foolish thing and put it as my first choice
> because of the pressure from teachers, friends and family. I was quite
> confident that I wouldn’t be accepted in Sharif University. I was
> really surprised when I learned that I had the 14th grade for the
> position. I expected the others to do far better than me.
>
> So, when I arrived at my dorm room, I wasn't very enthusiastic. What I
> found there didn't help either. I found a stinky mess in the room with
> three depressed guys who were hit by the Cultural Revolution and
> closing of the universities for almost two years, not to mention mostly
> arbitrary changes to the course syllabus and the fact that the room was
> designed for two students not four. I was dragging my foot when it came
> to studying civil engineering and was in the verge of dropping out of
> school and going to the war front when I discovered the joy of
> programming and computers.
>
> It was the second semester and we had a basic programming course on
> FORTRAN 66. We were punching cards and putting our deck of cards in the
> queue to be batch processed by Control Data CDC-6000 mainframe
> remaining from the seventies. We would get the printout of the program
> source and its output a few hours later. All of my programs ran
> correctly in the first try and my teacher kept all of my projects as
> outstanding examples of good solutions and stylish programming. He kept
> asking me whether I had prior experience with computers and refused to
> believe that I didn't.
>
> After that course, my life was changed forever. I started spending most
> of my time in the computer science department, computer lab, and its
> library. I continued the rest of my days in the university barely
> passing my courses in civil engineering and focusing my energy on
> programming and computer science instead. For those who don't know: I
> didn't have the choice of changing my study, because of the very
> limited capacities and the sheer resistance of t
